ZEN CHRIST

Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt 

FBC, March 23, 2008 – Easter Sunday

Scripture: John 20:1-18

 

 

 

     The Sunday School teacher was doing a review of holidays with her class, focusing on the original experience or rationale for the holiday. “Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving?” she asked. A child who always attended and could always be counted upon to have an answer replied, “Thanksgiving is to remember how the Pilgrims made it through the first year when they came to America, and to thank God for all the help.” The teacher moved on to Christmas, calling on another child who offered a rambling but basically accurate response about the birth of Jesus. Next came Passover, a less familiar holiday for the class, but one with such a compelling story that several children were able to provide responses. Finally the discussion turned to Easter, and the teacher called on a shy child, one she had actually not expected to raise his hand.

     “Easter is, um, is when Jesus had finished his work and, um, and he made people so mad that they made him die on a cross, “ the boy began tentatively. “That’s right!” the teacher beamed. “And what comes next in the story of Easter?”

     “Um, um, Jesus had friends who came and buried him in a cave with a big rock over the door of the cave.” “Good, good,” the teacher encouraged, “and then what?”

     The boy took a big breath and finished his answer in a rush of words. “Then after three days the rock rolled away and Jesus came out and saw his shadow and we had six more weeks of winter!”

     After all these centuries, all the doctrines and discussions, after all the church services and sermons and glorious music and lilies, it can still be difficult to determine the point of Easter. Oh, we know the story well if we have spent much time in a traditional church, the dramatic story that moves from betrayal and evil politics and the depths of suffering, through a brief time of mourning and death, to the not entirely unexpected conclusion of resurrection and triumph. And we have the cultural distractions of Easter bunnies and colored eggs and candy, distractions that never manage to completely eclipse the religious side of the holiday (unlike Christmas, where Santa outdoes Jesus every time). And if we no longer follow a traditional church path, then at Eastertime we hear about spring, new life, hope against all odds, all the interpretations offered to make the notion of resurrection into a metaphor that we can wrap our heads around.

     But even with time and culture and reinterpretation, Easter remains an odd holiday, a day that has too much going on for us to absorb it all, a day that contains a story really too fantastical for us to hang on to, which may be why the Sunday School child had trouble keeping the story straight. Jesus seeing his shadow after exiting the tomb makes about as much sense as having his dead body come back to life. 

     Former Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that most Christian theology had its beginnings in a kind of stammering response to something overwhelming that had happened. Events too complex, too mysterious, too stunning to even capture in words unfolded before the earliest Christians, and they dealt with the experience of being overwhelmed by coming up with words upon words upon words, trying in vain to explain what had happened, never quite succeeding, so that the next person who came along had to add even more words. In time, the experience gets lost in all the words generated about that experience. And no experience in the Christian tradition has generated more words than the experience we celebrate this morning, the experience of resurrection.

     So what might happen if we set aside all the words for a time in an effort to recall the experience? Set aside words of doctrine and dogma about what really happened and what it really meant, set aside traditional words of sacrifice and atonement and Son of God as well as contemporary words of new life and renewal and hope, and let the story unfold just as it is given to us?

     To get behind all the words about resurrection, it helps to consider the earliest account of resurrection, the one presented by the earliest gospel, the gospel of Mark. In contrast to the gospel accounts that came later, the author of Mark does not end his resurrection story with any appearance by Jesus at all: the women come to the tomb, find the stone rolled away and the tomb empty, are told by an angelic-appearing young man that what they see is not an instance of grave-robbing but evidence of the resurrection Jesus had promised them all along. The women are then told to go back and tell the disciples what had happened and wait around for further manifestations of the resurrection. Then the author of Mark ends his gospel in a singularly disconcerting way, without any sense of triumph: he says the women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). In the original language, the author of Mark adds to the sense of unease by ending his last sentence with a preposition, sort of like saying, “go with” or “look for” and never finishing the statement. Such an ending embodies the terror and amazement and inability to say anything that the story depicts. This is Barbara Brown Taylor’s stammering response to an overwhelming experience: what really can be said when you stand facing an empty tomb? 

    But the early church could not let such a profound mystery be without attempting to clarify and explain. An alternative ending was soon added to the gospel of Mark that included the requisite resurrection appearances. The later gospels of Matthew and Luke echoed those appearances, embellished them, added their own variations such as Jesus’ last scripture lesson provided on a hike to Emmaus, so that by the time the final gospel of John is composed, the first version of terror and amazement and an inability to speak and a sentence left dangling and unfinished has been covered over with words and additional chapters and a post-resurrection Jesus who hangs around for weeks getting in a few last words. Whatever the experience of resurrection was originally about has now been defined so thoroughly that it has become impossible to view it without already knowing what it means before it happens, impossible to hear the crucifixion story in all its agony without already knowing a happy ending is coming, impossible to consider the image of an empty tomb without turning around to see some sort of ghostly Jesus drifting into view, impossible to not hear our rational minds interpreting the story as an account of spring and rebirth because, as we all know, dead bodies do not resuscitate and after all, the later gospel stories make it clear this is a physical dead body that has returned and who can believe that? So the Easter story becomes either a vague, pastel-colored story reflecting the joy of springtime or something that bears a distressing similarity to movies like Night of the Living Dead.

     Mythology scholar Joseph Campbell makes a useful distinction between sign and symbol. A sign, Campbell notes, refers to one thing or idea; a sign has a single referent that can be clearly described, so that a sign and its meaning are precisely and linearly connected. By contrast, a symbol, in Campbell’s view, is open-ended: a symbol may have multiple references, a host of possible meanings, may even point to contradictory meanings at the same time. Signs are flat, concrete, and unidimensional; symbols are multifaceted, ambiguous, and multidimensional. Having drawn this distinction, Campbell asserts that religions have typically relied on symbolic language to communicate meaning; religious terms remained open-ended and carried multiple referents. However, under the combined influence of fundamentalism and science, Campbell believes that contemporary religion has become confused, has lost the ability to speak symbolically, and now relies on signs for communication, terms that have concrete, singular meanings.

     Whenever a mystery like resurrection is the subject under consideration, I believe we rapidly fall into Campbell’s symbol/sign confusion, with some resurrection language being symbolic, some being sign-level language, and without any consistency on the part of most of us. So some of the sermons being preached this morning will reject any account of the resurrection that would be a sign, a concrete instance of a body come back to life, but are open to symbolic understandings of the Easter story. Other sermons will present a fairly specific, defined version of resurrection—either that it actually happened and a body came back to life, or that it was all the product of grieving, overwrought minds and is entirely a metaphor—both instances of sign-level language. And still other sermons will reject any meaning in either a sign-resurrection or a symbol-resurrection. All these contradictory views of the resurrection, because they mix sign and symbol freely, are difficult to articulate and difficult to defend. Small wonder that just sticking with the Easter bunny, colored eggs, and images of spring seems the wisest course to take.

     Another way out of this morass is offered, ironically, by the last gospel to be composed and the one with the most extensive discussion of resurrection and its meaning, the gospel of John. Today’s reading of that account contains all the imagery we are accustomed to hearing in resurrection stories that followed Mark’s minimalist version: angels, details about graveclothes to make it clear this is no instance of graverobbing or corpse resuscitation but something of a different order, misunderstanding of what had actually happened, conflicting accounts of who knew what when, and what they did with the knowledge. But tucked away in all this elaborate storytelling is a curious exchange between the risen Jesus and Mary Magdalene. They meet, she mistakes him for the gardener, he speaks her name as a way of revealing his identity, and she seems to reach for him as any of us would if we unexpectedly found a loved one we had thought lost to us forever. Jesus deflects her reach with a strange injunction: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).  Given the obvious affection Jesus and Mary Magdalene shared, it is unlikely that he is simply forbidding her to touch him because of some sort of resurrection protocol; rather, he is making clear, from the outset, that resurrection appearances are not to be understood as signs but as symbols, and any effort to confine the meaning of resurrection within a concrete definition or a specific physical meaning will be a mistake. Do not hold on to me; do not try to tie me down; do not try to grasp what my being here in front of you means; do not insist on defining this experience beyond knowing that is points you to a deeper understanding of my relationship with you, my relationship with God, and your relationship with God. Understand this in terms of relationship—but do not hold on to me.

     So we take up the symbol of resurrection, turn it around and around in our hands to consider it from all sides, being with it being such a profound and terrifying mystery that nothing can be said about it, cycle through embellishments of appearances and meals scars that can be touched and an ever-widening audience, and end up in the gospel of John with Jesus warning that he is not to be held on to. That this warning comes at this point in the development of writings about Jesus makes sense, for with more writing and teaching comes an increased possibility that someone or some group will decide that it is possible to hold on to Jesus, to tie him down within a particular definition or dogma and thereby be done with him. The situation is comparable to that captured in a Buddhist anecdote in which the Buddha is lamenting the likelihood that his disciples will misunderstand his teaching. “How can I help you understand?” wondered the Buddha. “Think of it this way: think of my teaching as a finger, pointing at the moon. Why would you stare at a finger when you could be enjoying the beautiful moon in the night sky? The teaching is not reality, but a way to experience reality. Can you not see the difference between my finger and the moon?”   When Jesus cautions against holding on to him, he makes a similar distinction: the empty tomb is a way to experience the reality of resurrection, so why would we remain staring at an empty tomb when we could be enjoying the new dimension of life and love that resurrection, with its redefinition of relationship to God and one another, brings us?

     Christ is risen: Mark’s women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). Christ is risen: a sign is concrete and specific, a symbol is open-ended and ambiguous. Christ is risen: Jesus tells Mary Magdalene that she should not hold on to him. Christ is risen: the Buddha urges his followers to keep trying, to follow the direction the finger points and see the moon—at which point, once having seen the moon, there is no longer any reason to see the finger. The tomb is empty and it points us to resurrection and we have no need to continue wondering how the stone got rolled away: alleluia, Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed.